


Some Sunny Day

by Sinclaironfire



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Angst, Christmas Angst, Depression, Double Life, F/M, FOWL, For Cybra, For Evil Club, Let's Torture Scrooge McDuck, Lost Love, Major Time Gap, Merry Christmas, SHUSH, Things left unsaid, spy life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:15:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21956506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinclaironfire/pseuds/Sinclaironfire
Summary: Scrooge has lost a lot of people in his life. He didn’t think he would see Beakley again.
Relationships: Bentina Beakley/Scrooge McDuck
Comments: 3
Kudos: 28





	Some Sunny Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cybra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cybra/gifts).



> Merry Christmas to the best torture buddy I've ever had. Here's to another great year of emotionally and physically torturing this miserable old miser.

Scrooge McDuck had been alive a lot longer than most people.

Some of it was due to magic, a little of it was due to being cursed with longevity, and a smidge of it came from taking decent enough care of himself…. sometimes. Scrooge had lived long beyond what anyone or his enemies thought him capable of. In his years, he saw the rise and fall of empires, countries, and people. He’d seen a lot of good people die.

Too many good people had died.

In some cases, he never knew about it until well after the funeral, or years after the death occurred. He was partly to blame. For the man who was always on the go, news had a funny way of never reaching him in a timely matter. Even with advances in technology, the telegraph, the radio, email, and texting, he was still behind on everything. At one time, he came to accept it.

Death was a part of life. It was coming whether he got a notice about it or not and his friends, whom he cherished deeply, would have to face it sooner or later. Sure, Scrooge might not be there for the funeral, but he would carry their memories in his heart and his Money Bin for the rest of his life. Every time he would dive headfirst into the Bin, he would relive every waking moment, he would remember the adventures had, the treasure found, and the people he was lucky to know.

Out of all the people he had ever known, Scrooge considered Bentina Beakley to be among the best and brightest. She was, like most women Scrooge knew, dangerous. With a brilliant mind and cunning flair, there was hardly a situation that she could ever get herself out of or into.

It was why he loved her. Smart, dangerous, and strong, it was a thrilling combination that made his heart sing. The fact that she put up his admittedly show off tactics and understood the quiet moods he was prone to was just an added extra bonus. During their time together as SHUSH agents, they faced many dangerous together. When death was on the line and the stakes were high, Scrooge could count on Beakley to be there.

It was strange, but it never crossed his mind that one day, he would be reading about her death in the paper. The news came on a beautiful Sunday morning. It should have been criminal to receive such awful news on what started out as such a perfect day. Scrooge was dining in his bedroom in a rather lazy fashion. Still in his nightclothes, the world’s most seasoned adventurer, watched the world go by as he mindlessly nibbled on his breakfast and sipped his tea. The paper laid by his side, completely untouched. How could anyone worry about the world when it was such a perfect day?

Scrooge was content to stay the rest of the day, simply lounging about without a care in the world. However, the old urge to get up, move, and defy nature made him pick up the paper. The front page was nothing to get excited about. His stocks were doing fine, the weather patterns were normal so far, but it was on the international page that his world completely stopped.

**TEMP AGENCY BURNS**

**DEATH TOLL RISES**

**36 VICTIMS AND COUNTING**

In London, a rather nondescript temp agency had mysteriously burned in the middle of the day. No one saw the cause and no one could run in and help. Once the flames went up, everyone inside was as good as dead. The structure itself was highly unstable and with many people missing and presumed dead, the police had released the photos of those who worked inside in hopes of placing names to the victims.

On the second page, with her photo blown up three times, was Bentina Beakley.

The noise Scrooge made when he saw her face was somewhere between a dying man’s last gasp for air and being wounded. He scanned the page again, hoping that it was a fluke or a flaw or something. But it wasn’t. He knew her face anywhere.

Scrooge was off to London before noon.

The entire flight was done in agonizing silence. All he could think about was Beakley’s last moments as the flames got hotter and escape was impossible. For twelve hours he tortured himself with those thoughts. He knew Beakley better than anyone. She wasn’t one to give up. She was a fighter through and through. To her last dying breath, she would have fought until she couldn’t fight anymore.

When Scrooge arrived in London and saw the burnt-out remains of what was once the glittering home to the most talented and amazing spies in the world, he could barely make sense of it all. What’s worse was that as more news came forward, the spies’ alter egos came to life. Instead of hearing Beakley’s exploits and having her life properly honored, all he heard en masse was that she was a secretary for the temp agency. She was unmarried, had no friends, and she was a completely average person with no particular talents.

How wrong the media was. Beakley was everything! She made SHUSH into the success that it was! Who else would go running into a terrorist den to save the day? Who else was there to disarm a bomb with only twenty seconds left? Beakley was everything that her cover wasn’t. And he couldn’t mourn her as herself.

There could be no mourning whatsoever.

As a multibillionaire, he was recognizable both far and wide. Everyone knew who he was. If he started to openly weep over some secretary from some temp agency that he shouldn’t know anything about, it would raise suspicion. Scrooge buried his emotions as deep as he could. He could not cry for Bentina Beakley.

Scrooge would be the first person to say that he didn’t deal with grief well. His way of dealing with the hole in his heart was to throw himself headfirst into work. Losing people pushed him to succeed. Losing Beakley pushed him to the point where he became the world’s richest duck. He should have been happy, signing the last piece of paperwork that put him head and shoulders above everyone else, but he wasn’t. He had no one. His family was more or less estranged, his work consumed him relentlessly, and the one person he knew that he could call to brag how he outwitted everyone was long gone.

Nevertheless, he still held his phone in his hand with this thumb hovering over her icon to call. Sometimes he did call her, just to hear the sound of her voice. The phone rang once, twice, three more times before going to voicemail.

“This is Agent 22. I can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave your message after the tone.”

“Beakley, I did it. I am now the world’s richest duck!” He tried to sound enthusiastic. After all, it was his life’s goal he was talking about. “I did it. I did it……I…I miss you.”

He would have given his entire fortune to hear her say “I miss you too” on the other line.

In the years that came, Scrooge found that no amount of treasure or adventure could ever fill the Beakley shaped hole in his heart. He did make an honest effort to collect and save and defy death on multiple occasions, but without her by his side, the thrill was gone. He jumped from demon dimensions, the murky depths of the sea, to the hidden fairy realms of the world, and yet, nothing changed.

Beakley was dead.

He was alone.

And then, to compound his grief, Duckworth died.

It was hard enough to lose Beakley, but to lose Duckworth as well? Scrooge had decided that the world was an awful place and he didn’t want to join it anymore. Thus, began his quick descent into hermit-hood. It suited him perfectly – shutting out the insanity of the world, compiling his grief with the sugared memories of yesteryear, and being a general grump was great! And yet, despite the fact that he had no staff, he had no friends and stopped talking to the outside world, Scrooge was not alone. On the first Christmas without Duckworth and Beakley, the Christmas Spirits of the Past, Present, and Future still came to visit. They paid no attention to his pleas to be left alone. If anything, his protests made them stay longer.

“But it’s Christmas, Scrooge!” Present howled at the sight of the barren manor. “You could have put up some holly!”

“Christmas be damned!” Scrooge seethed, in a pathetic attempt to push the Spirit out.

“Don’t you have any joy in your heart?” Past pestered, sitting comfortably on Scrooge’s shoulder.

“Why should I?”

“Because it is Christmas, Scrooge!” Present repeated. “You know, abundance, charity, goodwill towards men?”

“Happy memories of Christmases past! The warmth and love of the friends that you have made and kept over the years.” Past looked to Future to join in. The silent specter took a deep breath but shook his head. “You’re no help,” Past frowned.

“You should take pointers from him,” Scrooge insisted. “You keep Christmas in your own way and leave me to do mine.”

“But no one should be alone on Christmas,” chorused Past and Present.

“And yet, here I am. NOW BEGONE!”

He banished the ghosts from his home, yet the spirits of those he missed still remained. To his great annoyance, there was a knock at the door. Was there no end to the constant pestering? He went to the door, to the never-ending knocking, and nearly ripped the doors out of their hinges.

“LEAVE ME ALO-“

In place of the spirits, he thought he was shouting out, was a woman. She was a tall, well-dressed, and silver-haired with a no-nonsense scowl that could put anyone in their place. His first thought was that she was some distant descendant of her’s. One who was lucky enough to inherit her grace and charm. But the way she brandished the umbrella like a sword and pointed it to his heart, he knew that without a doubt she was the one and only Bentina Beakley.

“Why in Heaven’s name did I see Past, Present, and Future….what’s wrong?”

Tears stung his eyes and a gasp was hardly kept back. “I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!” he sobbed as he wrapped his arms around her. “I…London…the agency and….”

A soft look of surprise and regret appeared on Beakley’s face. “Oh, oh! Oh dear, I think we better have a talk.”

In the kitchen, under the poorly maintained lights, did everything finally come out. Although, if you had asked Scrooge, it all seemed like a dream. She had been dead and gone for years. To see her, a little bit older, a little grayer, but the same woman all this time was bizarre. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her. All these years, after all this time, she was alive. What had she done all this time? What was she doing here of all places?

“What happened in London?” Scrooge asked, his eyes filled with tears and a very pronounced sniffle.

“We were compromised. Had to destroy everything,” Beakley sighed and shrugged. “Executed order 78.”

“FOWL?”

“Who else?” Beakley growled.

“How far did it go?” Scrooge asked.

“Far enough that Ludwig gave the order the second the news reached him.”

So, she didn’t know it was coming either. It was some comfort. It wasn’t much, but it was some.

“How long have you been living undercover?” he asked.

“Over thirty years. I had to completely start over. All of my covers were blown.”

That was saying something. As a spy, Beakley had an arsenal of useful disguises and premade personas for every occasion.

“You could have contacted me. I would have helped,” Scrooge said in earnest.

“I wanted to,” she said, her voice soft and mournful. “Not a day went by that I didn’t think about calling you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

There was not a thing in the world that he wouldn’t have done for her. Whether it was money or helping her escape her enemies, he would have been there in a heartbeat.

“Oh Scrooge, a good spy is one that no one recognizes.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Did you know that you’re the most photographed person in the world?” she asked. “Everyone knows who you are, who your associates are, who your enemies are. The second you do anything it shows up the six o’clock news.”

“Ah….well….”

Damn, she had a point.

“Why now?”

“Duckworth,” she answered. “Back in the day, when we first met, we both agreed that should anything happen to either one of us, we were to make sure that you weren’t left alone. When I heard about his passing, I came out of hiding.”

“Where were you living?”

“That’s classified. Sorry, dear, I would tell you everything but protocol states –“

“Protocol be damned, I’m happy to have you alive!”

He embraced her and leaned into her warmth. The hole in his heart was slowly rebuilding itself. He didn’t know when it would be finished or if it would ever be finished, but with Beakley, he was more than happy to let it take its time.


End file.
